Amid the dominance of American giants like OpenAI, Meta, and Google, alongside the emerging Chinese player DeepSeek, is there a viable path for European artificial intelligence companies? French firm Mistral AI and the German-French-British start-up Helsing are optimistic about this prospect. On February 10, during the opening of the two-day Artificial Intelligence Action Summit, the two companies unveiled their partnership, aiming, as articulated by Guillaume Lample, Mistral’s scientific director and co-founder, to “transform the defense sector,” an area particularly ripe for AI innovation.
“We share concerns regarding sovereignty,” remarked Antoine Bordes, the French AI lead at Helsing, which operates in Germany, France, and the UK through two entities. He emphasized that “Europeans have significant potential if they fully commit and take proactive measures.”
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This partnership focuses on developing “vision-language-action” models, representing a new wave of AI that can interpret its surroundings through video feeds and subsequently determine robotic actions to assist in operating devices like drones, according to Bordes. Initial outcomes are anticipated “within a few months.” This collaboration mirrors the December 2024 announcement of a partnership between American defense technology firm Anduril and OpenAI, aimed at creating anti-drone technologies.
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